Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick said his party has been “unable or unwilling” to do what is required to cut the number of people coming to the UK.
The former immigration minister said hundreds of thousands of people “we didn’t need” had arrived legally while “dangerous” immigrants could not be deported.
Mr Jenrick, who backs pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to tackle issues around small boat crossings, said “our people and Parliament must be sovereign”.
In a video to launch his leadership campaign, he said: “When I was minister for immigration, I saw dangerous people coming into our country. I saw us unable to deport them. I saw hundreds of thousands of people we frankly didn’t need coming in legally.
“But our politics was unable or unwilling to deliver what was needed.
“The new government aren’t going to fix things. They have too many delusions.
“Our party is our country’s best hope.
“But we have a mountain to climb and real choices to make. We won’t regain people’s trust with platitudes.”
Mr Jenrick resigned from Rishi Sunak’s government in 2023, claiming that the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda did not go far enough.
In his pitch to replace Mr Sunak, he said: “I believe that anyone who comes here illegally must be deported within days. I believe that ending mass migration won’t be plain sailing. But we must do it.
“I believe we can and must get our economy to grow much faster. By building more homes in our cities. Producing more reliably cheap energy. And getting our people real skills, not low-value degrees. I believe in a safety net but far too many people are on welfare right now.
“I want a small state that works. Not a big one that fails.”
He said the Tory party needs to change “a lot” in the wake of its worst election defeat but it must maintain values including respect for institutions and a “desire for national unity, not division”.
“We lost support in part because we stopped upholding these values,” he said.
Mr Jenrick, who bookmakers have as second favourite in the race behind Kemi Badenoch, said: “I will unite us around the actual solutions to the challenges we face.”
Shadow work and pensions secretary Mel Stride, an outsider in the leadership race, insisted that he was the one who stood the best chance of bringing the party together.
He told LBC Radio: “I think most parliamentarians on our side would say that I’m respected across the party, my political positioning, being pretty much on the centre-right, I think is good for that.”
Mr Stride said the party had “spent too much time fighting each other” but he could “bring our parliamentary party back together as one united force”.
He suggested Mr Jenrick’s stance on the ECHR could put him at odds with some of his own MPs.
“I think it’s really important to understand that whatever position is taken will have to be one that’s a universal position held by the parliamentary Conservative Party and that putting stakes in the ground very early now – I see the attraction of doing it – but putting stakes in the ground actually is a pretty tricky thing to do.
“Because what you don’t want to do is win this contest and go back to your parliamentary crew back at the ranch and say ‘here I am, let’s all get together’ and half of them say ‘hold on a minute, you’ve committed to this, this and this and I don’t like that and I’m not going to play ball’.”
Six candidates are challenging for the leadership – Mr Jenrick, Mrs Badenoch, Mr Stride, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Dame Priti Patel – with the winner announced on November 2.
The field will be narrowed to four in time for the Tory conference in the autumn before MPs vote for a final two who will face a ballot of Conservative members.
